Comment by lxgr
2 years ago
> for the rest of the world the insane mark up on that communication method has mostly obsoleted it...
For P2P communication. SMS is alive and well for B2C messaging, most importantly for 2FA OTP delivery, but also as a first line of defense against spam/bot account creation.
It's not a good solution to either problem, but it's slightly better than nothing (which apparently makes it good enough for many), so I suspect we're stuck with it for now.
> That'd be all well and good... the technology would die naturally, but all my American relatives continue to stubbornly use iMessage.
iMessage is not SMS, though. It just uses phone numbers as identifiers, but so do many other popular over-the-top messengers, including the most popular one globally.
To clarify - iMessage does not use SMS if you're going from Apple to Apple device and both devices have data/wifi available. iMessage refuses to support messaging to Android clients and defaults to SMS for these messages.
I've got an Android phone so all iMessage transmissions come across as SMS (or MMS).
Ah, I see what you mean. That's not what I'd call iMessage though, that's just SMS:
The iOS application is called "Messages"; iMessage is the over-the-top Apple-exclusive messaging service.
Messages inflexible reliance on SMS for communication to non-Apple devices is definitely an Apple issue, in my opinion. Apple has made it clear that they continue to default to SMS for non-iPhone communication solely because it's unpleasant for everyone involved.
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My phone runs Android, I'm pretty much forced to use SMS in order to communicate with anyone who uses an iPhone and that's most of my family. While it can be argued that iMessage provides a good enough experience on an iPhone for most people, I have wondered if they are the one thing keeping SMS alive.
> I have wondered if they are the one thing keeping SMS alive.
Absolutely they are. Most of my friends and family are Pixel users and we all communicate using RCS. If Apple would just support the modern replacement for SMS (which includes end to end encryption), iPhone users would be much safer and would have a better experience.
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> For P2P communication. SMS is alive and well for B2C messaging, most importantly for 2FA OTP delivery, but also as a first line of defense against spam/bot account creation.
In Brazil, businesses use Whatsapp to communicate with consumers. You order pizza and book doctor appointments over whatsapp